Mario-themed Chucks stomp on good taste, but we don’t care

8-bit tribute paid in court-shoe form

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Here's Last Level, one of the Mario-themed sets of kicks released by Converse in collaboration with Nintendo. As you can see, the ankle folds down to switch between “Mario vs Bowser” and “Mario and Princess Toadstool” tableaux. It’s storytelling in shoe form, or perhaps just footwear's attempt at a flipbook. The Level 1 shoe, meanwhile, depicts midgets stomping on living mushrooms and/or collecting floating coins: things whose real-world likelihood is, frankly, higher than that of any dedicated sneaker-pimp actually wearing these ornate exemplars of the sweatshop cobbler's art.

They'll be available at Nike retailers from August, while a simpler pattern, the All Over, goes on sale next month. What do you make of them?